Totally agree Philly, I think its mainly preference, but alot has to do with where you're driving (stop and go traffic during a commute, or fun backroads on the weekends).

This is probably blasphemy on this forum, but I was actually torn a few weeks ago on whether or not get a crossfire. I almost had a deal on an dark blue '00 trans am ws6 w/ an auto, mildly tuned, decent milage, all for about 10K! (and people say crossfires have depreciated in value...) I was fairly set on it, but by the time I called someone else had already put a deposit down.



*before I say anything else, I apologize, I'm not trying to hijack the thread, just replying to photoman*

I'll start by saying that I tend to get ahead of myself while typing. When I said all corvettes were auto, I meant that in context of the "in my neck of the woods" phrase. Here in central PA, I've got no less than 3 used vette dealers within an hour of my house. Maybe its just my region but I hardly see any used manual vettes around. Just as an example, the one used car guy has roughly 25 c3,4, and 5's sitting on his lot. While I was looking for an affordable c4 last year, I remember seeing 3 cars with a stick there, a c3, a c5, and a c4 parts car that wasn't even repairable.

all in all the production #'s for manual vs. auto vettes from the early/mid 70's through the 80's was extremely slanted toward the autos. I think it was '72 that started the trend where roughly 2/3 of the vettes were autos and from there the ratio of autos to manuals continued to rise. Anyway, point is corvettes were largely produced with automatics for several years.

As I said it is all about preference, I don't disagree that the 4spd stingrays were great. I just couldn't find one in my region for a price I could afford, again theyre harder to come by than the autos. I for one REALLY hate the Doug Nash 4+3's in the early c4's (clunky garbage imo, also know some guys who had strange problems with them). Going back to affordability, I could never find a working 89-96 zf 6spd vette for a decent price. If you've been in a c5 with the "skip-shift" manual (I'm not sure if it's in the c6's as well...) you'd probably agree that it's a fairly lame ploy to eek out an extra 1-2 mpg on the window sticker at the expense of the driving experience. On the whole, I have to agree that their are plenty of great options for transmissions in vettes. I just feel that there have been a handful of glaring spots in the generations where good transmissions have taken a back seat to inferior ones or unnecessary gimmicks (4+3 and skip shift are good examples).